place and plant driven herbal goods

Well, hello dear old blog. I have really enjoyed not having to fiddle with you, truly. Something about the process of getting a blog post up and tinkering with changes is too much computer and headache than just the beauty of the words, the balance for a while just tipped between knowing how long it would take sitting here with not writing work versus being able to share the bits and pieces appropriate for this form, the dailies. I have enjoyed using Instagram as a mini-blog of sorts, but let’s get real; we can’t fit all our stories into a picture and a tiny box and our pocket. They need room and I need space.

My two younger children are at a friend’s for the morning so that I can work. I am ostensibly trying to make some money again out here on the farm, in about twenty directions, none of which have really stuck enough to become a real business yet. Still, instead of heading straight to it, to a late planting of beans that I hope will survive the deer nibbles, to some fall crop seeding, to another bit of elderflower gathering for elixir, to cutting back the catnip and oregano, to weeding, always weeding, and getting some really pretty basil potted up into boxes, to this farm that I love and that keeps me grounded, connected, inspired, and holy, I opened WordPress. Because what is burning inside my brain all the time is the way life continues to coalesce into narrative, so deeply beautiful, impossibly meaningful. Because if I die tomorrow, as the saying goes, I want to have given these pockets of madness that are my human experience back in form to this embodied experiment of life.

Last year stripped us bare. Us, the collective us, all of us, individually. At least it tried to. In a post everything world, we have two choices. Continue to let the crumbs fall where they rightfully should, or decide with all our might to co-create a wildly better world.

And somehow, for me, I know that weaving stories that build bridges, between the land and the people and people and their innermost selves, is my way to make reparations, to help repair. To heal. To encourage the remembrance and radical connection necessary to wiggle through this wormhole we have been offered.

So, I will see how this little extra room fits for now, this morning at least. To be growing always, and wild, means being okay with both constant imagining and continued surrender. The ego quiets, the mind clears, the heart pumps, and one step in front of the other, you let your brambly, prickly, weedy, purposefully lovely self make your medicine and you share it.

Like this:

Because truly the world is burning right now, and we are all standing in the fire. I choose now to soften all the way, to bare myself, open wide, and write it all down to make sure we know it is okay. That we are okay. More than okay, we are divine. We will always rise from the ashes.

It is nearly summer solstice. We, our family, here on this farm, are traveling through this season without farming for an income any longer. We are traveling around the circle of the seasons and so much is the same while so much is different.The intense push, hard in all the ways, that last season gave us to finally let that business go, that one-time dream, one-time call, has settled. The egos have survived, even when they thought they might not. Letting go has usually been something I feel I do so gracefully. But this was hard. Really hard.

Mostly because we always think we have to be something. We were farmers. We were farmers for our community. It was a big part of the way we moved inside our space. It had been our life for eight years. Our plan for more like thirteen years. And I like change. I embrace change. I daydream about change. But this threw me to the wolves. I couldn’t see clearly. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure after so long holding sure like a hostage in my tightening chest and it was frightening. I somehow thought our world was going to crumble. That things were breaking.

And yet, that isn’t all the way true. What I really knew, so very deeply, was that our world was going to expand. That breaking it was necessary to enlarge it. That we needed so desperately to move on. And, goodness, the world has grown and we keep growing and our farm is still here and we are still here. Growing food for our family, spreading compost out all over our beaten hearts and healing some of the parts of life that had, like much of our farm, been neglected and overgrown.

The story is so cliche it kills me.

Farming.

It is such good honest work. It means something know matter what. And it is also so fucking hard. The money is too thin and too bare even though you are putting your heart and soul into that dirt. The awareness of the true cost, the labor, that all food is born of, is mostly lost to really all of us, even my silly farm kids living this life. There is so much to write about this. How to make the small-scale sustainable farm sustainable, for the farmers? Nourishing and not depleting, for the farmers? So many pieces still to puzzle out in this movement. I have essays going and so much to say and so much I still want to discover about something I truly believed in and hate feeling jaded about.

But here we are in June. And after all that revolutioning, inside and out, we are basking for now in the glory. The glory of a new path. Writing about farming and gardening for my family, I can still do this. I can tell the stories that are mine to tell in the hopes that we all keep moving forward. Not just the small farm and farmer, but us, the people, connected here on earth through the clay that clings to our skin and through time and space by the crying or bubbling of the stars inside us. The threads woven by words told true and with an open heart have a power of their own. They create a net that can hold us all on this journey into a new world.

Because truly the world is burning right now, and we are all standing in the fire. I choose now to soften all the way, to bare myself, open wide, and write it all down to make sure we know it will be okay. It can be uncomfortable. It should be uncomfortable. But it can be okay. We are okay. More than okay, we are divine. We will always rise from the ashes.

Burned. Grown back. It happens, and we can fight it or find our selves more truly and lovingly inside the flames.

Like this:

Imagine, here, the longest, sweetest, exhale of all. Every bit of tension in the shoulders, the low back, the stomach, released. Summer has gone.

Not that fall doesn’t come with its own troubles, especially when big changes take place that land you, once again, (always, I worry), under the weight of financial stress. But the fog, the cool night air, it wraps its arms around me, this house, slowly finding order from the chaos of the busy farm season, the children, all of us, it seems, and there is a comfort there. We keep moving forward, truly we do, but always in our own slow, steady way, always coming back to our center, which revolves around each other, our relationships, our duty and care for one another. It is hard, at times, when I want things to be easy, but then I remember, it probably isn’t easy for anyone, life, not if you are actively engaged in the living of it, anyway.

But it is in those tough spots we rub up against throughout our lives that we usually find the most meaning, our own meaning, if we are looking for it. I’ve answered a million questions that stalked me this summer just by facing the fire of it all. And for someone like me, that’s what I am here to do, so I can be fully present and wide open to the flow of life through and around me, so I can be of use to this world in the ways that I find laid out before me.

What am I really rambling about, anyway?

So much, and so little, I suppose.

This year, this year of the horse, has been nothing short of the wild ride I could feel it mounting to be back in January. And as challenging as it was for me, for the people in my life I love most of all, and as challenging as it continues to be, I find the ride and all of the ups and downs that come with it all worth it all.

Because I can’t imagine it another way. Static doesn’t hold much appeal over here and besides, we know and hold onto the fact that there is no arrival, it is all about the movement and what we choose to do with the moment that matters in this game. So, worry and joy live side by side, trial and bliss. We keep moving because life is moving. We live fully in the fog in the fall, we face the sun in the summer. We stand in the fire come winter, so we can rebirth ourselves each spring. We grow, wild, here on this farm. Together, apart, thick in the mystery of it all.